Musk Removes Tesla and SpaceX Facebook Pages
March 24th, 2018Via: The Verge:
During a tweetstorm, Elon Musk has removed both of his companies’ Facebook pages after being challenged to do so by a few of his followers. The pages of both SpaceX and Tesla are now inactive. Each had around 2.6 million followers.
Musk was answering a flurry of tweets this morning when he responded to one from Signal’s Brian Acton, co-founder of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp, that contained the hashtag #deletefacebook. “What’s Facebook?” Musk queried. Afterward, a follower told Musk he should delete SpaceX’s Facebook page if Musk was “the man.” Musk claimed he didn’t even know it existed and then said he would, probably in an attempt to preserve his “the man” status.
Things ballooned from there. After someone showed Musk a screengrab of the SpaceX Facebook page, he noted it was the first time he had seen it and that it would “be gone soon.” Then someone prompted him to delete Tesla’s Facebook page, with Musk responding that it “looks lame anyway.” And just for good measure, it seems that the Facebook page for Tesla-owned Solar City has disappeared as well.
U.S. Military Research Into Generating Sounds with Lasers
March 21st, 2018This one is a keeper!
Via: DefenseOne:
Within three years, the Pentagon’s non-lethal weapons lab hopes to have a direct energy weapon that can produce an effect like a haunted walkie-talkie or the biblical burning bush.
UK Court Hears of Plot To Rape, Dissolve in Acid Children For Pleasure of Unnamed ‘Top Politicians’
March 19th, 2018The source article is paywalled at Court News UK: Plot to Abuse Children for ‘Top Political People’:
A paedophile told an undercover police officer that they could make millions of pounds raping children on camera for ‘top political people,’ a court heard. Gihan Muthukumarana, 28, claimed they could sell the film for £10m if they ‘got rid’ of the young girls afterwards by dissolving them in barrels of acid, it is claimed. He was reported to the police after he told escort about his plans while regularly meeting her for sex at the Master Robert Hotel…
Via: Breitbart:
Gihan Muthukumarana told undercover police they could make £10 million raping children on video for “top political people”, a court has heard.
The 28-year-old, who appeared in court this week accused of plotting to kidnap, rape, and beat young girls, allegedly claimed that footage of the abuse could be sold for “ridiculously big” sums of money if they “got rid” of the victims by dissolving their bodies in a vat of acid afterwards, Court News UK reports.
Trump’s Election Consultants Filmed Saying They Use Bribes and Sex Workers to Entrap Politicians
March 19th, 2018Via: Channel 4:
An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers.
Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.
In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”
Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.
The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.
Mr Nix told our reporter: “…we’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows, and I look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you.”
Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Woman Crossing Street
March 19th, 2018Update: Police Release Video
The LIDAR system should have easily been able to detect that a pedestrian was in the road. Additionally, despite the difficult lighting situation, an alert human driver probably wouldn’t have hit the woman. A professional driver, trained in defensive driving techniques, almost certainly wouldn’t have hit the woman. The ride-along driver in this case was obviously distracted.
I find it very strange that the AI made no attempt to swerve to avoid the person or slow the vehicle. This could have been a case that showed how autonomous systems can shine in difficult situations…
To me, this looks like both the human driver and Uber’s self-drive system are to blame for this death.
I drove for FedEx for five years. All couriers have to be internally certified for the road by a FedEx defensive driving specialist. Decades later, I still drive the way I was taught at FedEx and have avoided many serious accidents using the techniques (especially in NZ, which has the worst drivers I’ve ever encountered anywhere in the world). If this accident had happened with a FedEx driver behind the wheel, FedEx would have assigned blame to the driver. No doubt about it. Show the video of what happened to any FedEx driver or ground ops manager and ask them if the company would call this “Preventable” or “Not Preventable”? Definitely, 100% preventable.
Via: Engadget:
The Tempe Police department has released video (warning: this video may be disturbing to some) taken by the interior and exterior cameras of the Uber SUV that struck and killed a woman, Elaine Herzberg, on Sunday night. The video shows the immediate moments before the crash, and the police said that the Vehicular Crimes Unit is actively investigating.
Based on the video, it appears that the victim had already walked across one lane on that side of the street with her bike, but was in the shadows until the car reached her. Inside, the human safety driver looks down toward her lap, and looks up just before the crash, appearing to be surprised. It’s difficult to tell in the grainy black and white view exactly how much any driver would be able to see and when. Still, it seems like a self-driving car’s LIDAR sensors should have been able to pick up the presence and motion of a pedestrian even if she went into the street away from a crosswalk.
—
Update: Tempe Police Chief Says Early Probe Shows No Fault by Uber
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode.
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” said Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Ariz., the location for the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
—
Via: Reuters:
An Uber self-driving car hit and killed a woman crossing the street in Arizona, police said on Monday, marking the first fatality caused by an autonomous vehicle and a potential blow to the technology expected to transform transportation.
The ride services company said it was suspending North American tests of its self-driving vehicles, which are currently going on in Arizona, Pittsburgh and Toronto.
…
Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking outside the crosswalk on a four-lane road in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe about 10 p.m. MST Sunday (0400 GMT Monday) when she was struck by the Uber vehicle, police said. The car was in autonomous mode with an operator behind the wheel.
Herzberg later died from her injuries in a hospital, police said.
Two Weeks Before His Death, Hawking Submitted a Paper on Parallel Universes
March 19th, 2018I still miss Walter and the gang from Fringe.
Via: ScienceAlert:
Stephen Hawking submitted the final version of his last scientific paper just two weeks before he died, and it lays the theoretical groundwork for discovering a parallel universe.
Hawking, who passed away on Wednesday aged 76, was co-author to a mathematical paper which seeks proof of the “multiverse” theory, which posits the existence of many universes other than our own.
The paper, called “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation”, had its latest revisions approved on March 4, ten days before Hawking’s death.
According to The Sunday Times newspaper, the paper is due to be published by an unnamed “leading journal” after a review is complete.
ArXiv.org, Cornell University website which tracks scientific papers before they are published, has a record of the paper including the March 2018 update.
According to The Sunday Times, the contents of the paper sets out the mathematics necessary for a deep-space probe to collect evidence which might prove that other universes exist.
The highly theoretical work posits that evidence of the multiverse should be measurable in background radiation dating to the beginning of time. This in turn could be measured by a deep-space probe with the right sensors on-board.
Battery Makers Descend on Australia, Canada Cobalt Developers
March 18th, 2018Via: Reuters:
Nervous Asian battery makers are turning to early-stage cobalt projects in Australia and Canada to lock in supplies of the critical battery ingredient ahead of expected shortages as demand for electric vehicles revs up.
Mine developers say interest from Japanese and Korean firms is particularly strong as they compete with rivals from China, which has built deep supply chain ties with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s top producer.
The central African country accounts for nearly two-thirds of global cobalt output and production is set to rise despite concerns over the use of child miners and rising royalties.
“We are starting to see the first signs of an arms race to secure long term cobalt supplies,” said Joe Kaderavek, chief executive of Australia’s Cobalt Blue.
“With over 85 percent of new global cobalt supply over the next decade coming from Africa, in a region where the Chinese have entrenched relationships, the Korean and Japanese cobalt processing industries are very focused upon Australian and Canadian projects.”
Related: Cobalt to be Declared a Strategic Mineral in Congo
Intel: ‘Partitions’ in New Chips Will Correct Design Flaw that Created Spectre and Meltdown
March 18th, 2018Via: GeekWire:
After security researchers were able to exploit design flaws in modern processors that lay undetected for up to 20 years, Intel said it would redesign future chips to correct those flaws, and on Thursday it provided a little more information about how that will work.
Starting with the Cascade Lake version of its Xeon server processors later this year, Intel will incorporate “protective walls” in its hardware that prevent malicious hackers from using speculative execution techniques to steal private information from the secure part of the processor. These fixes will also ship with the PC version of the Cascade Lake chips, but the tech industry has been much more concerned about the effect of these design flaws on server processors running in data centers and cloud vendors.
By 2019 Every New Ford Will Have 4G LTE Connectivity for Over-The-Air Updates
March 18th, 2018Tesla has been doing this for years, and it’s very disturbing. Of course, the justification is that changes can be made to the car to fix things over the air, without the customer having to bring the car in for servicing. I get all of that. But many people don’t realize that the vehicles are also transmitting imagery from multiple video cameras back to Tesla. The new Model 3 has a driver facing camera inside the car!
*pfft* you say. The number of vehicles Tesla is selling amounts to a noise level phenomenon.
But Ford… That’s huge.
My guess is that virtually nobody will be discouraged by these and many other privacy concerns, never mind the potential health issues. While you and I probably won’t ever buy such a car, just about everyone else will. This means that even those of us who refuse will be swept up in the surveillance networks that these vehicles will create.
Via: Ars Technica:
Ahead of this month’s New York International Auto Show, Ford released some info about its plans to adapt to the changing world of transportation. The Blue Oval says it’s “going all-in on hybrids,” including versions of the F-150 truck and Mustang sports car. The automaker is also readying six new battery electric vehicles (BEVs) by 2022, with the first due in 2020, and adding more performance versions of its SUV line up. Additionally, by the end of 2019, every new Ford will have 4G LTE connectivity, and the company is developing a new cloud platform that will deliver over-the-air updates.
11 Different Brands of Bottled Water Purchased in 9 Countries: 93% Contain Plastic Particles
March 18th, 2018Via: CBC:
The bottled water industry is estimated to be worth nearly $200 billion a year, surpassing sugary sodas as the most popular beverage in many countries. But its perceived image of cleanliness and purity is being challenged by a global investigation that found the water tested is often contaminated with tiny particles of plastic.
“Our love affair with making single-use disposable plastics out of a material that lasts for literally centuries — that’s a disconnect, and I think we need to rethink our relationship with that,” says Prof. Sherri Mason, a microplastics researcher who carried out the laboratory work at the State University of New York (SUNY).
